Dag Westerståhl

Dag Westerståhl was born in Stockholm 1946, and got his PhD at the University of Gothenburg with Per Lindström as supervisor. Since 2011 he is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy and Logic at Stockholm University; from 1998 to 2010 he was August Rhöös Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Gothenburg. Between 2005 and 2010 he held a Special Grant for Excellent Researchers by the Swedish Council for Research (VR).

His main research interests are logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language. A central theme is generalized quantifiers, studied both from a model-theoretic and a linguistic point of view; see his book with Stanley Peters, Quantifiers in Language and Logic (OUP, 2006). A recent application (also with Peters) is to the semantics of possessive constructions. Another main research theme is philosophical and mathematical aspects of compositionality. A third ongoing research project, pursued together with Denis Bonnay, concerns the extraction of (logical) constants from (logical) consequence relations. He has also written on situation theory and situation semantics, and on philosophy of mathematics.

DW is currently a member of the editorial boards of the following journals: Journal of Logic, Language and Information (where he was Managing Editor 1996-2001), Linguistics and Philosophy, Review of Symbolic Logic, Semantics and Pragmatics, Logic in Asia: Studia Logica Library. He is Logic Editor (with Aldo Antonelli) for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

DW has taught at several of the European and North-American Summer Schools of Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI and NASSLLI). He has also, together with Jouko Väänänen, Phokion Kolaitis, and Samson Abramsky, initiated and helped organize three similar schools in China (Guangzhou 2010, Chongqing 2012, Beijing 2014). In China he has in addition taught at Tsinghua University and at Beijing Normal University, and he is on the Advisory Board of the Joint ILLC and Tsinghua Research Center in Logic.

'Negation and quantification: a new look at the square of opposition' (with comments by Fengkui Ju and Larry Moss, and a reply by DW), 2013, in J. van Benthem and F. Liu (eds.), Logic across the University: Foundations and Applications, Studies in Logic 47, College Publications, London, 301-317.
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